Keifer Buckingham Shares Global Health Policy Insight & Experience
By Maya Gabby
On Tuesday, January 21, 2020, our “Conversations in Global Health” lecture welcomed Keifer Buckingham, Senior Policy Advisor for International Public Health at Open Society Foundations (OSF). Buckingham began with an overview of her path to her current role at OSF. In speaking about critical moments in her educational journey, she cited both her undergraduate and graduate programs as having significant impacts on her career trajectory.
Buckingham, like many other global health professionals, has worked on a variety of health areas over the course of her career, but has grappled most with the politics of reproductive health rights. When asked about the current state of the Global Gag Rule (GGR), it was obvious that it remains her passion. Under the Trump administration, the GGR – or the Mexico City Policy as it is also known as has been vastly expanded and is now the “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance. Funding for international health services through USAID and PEPFAR have been drastically impacted. Having lobbied for the Global Health Empowerment and Rights (HER) Act this past summer, which would permanently end the GGR, I was curious if there had been any meaningful improvement. Unfortunately, while global health funding used to be a relatively bipartisan issue, the current administration has caused increasing polarization and the bill has not been moved beyond democratic participation.
However, hope is not lost -- at least not according to Buckingham. She is a firm believer in “budgets [as] moral documents, even when they don’t pass”. And while the Trump administration has offered very little to improving sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), house democrats have continued to list global health assistance as a top priority in their budgetary considerations. Buckingham is quick to cite the financial return of family planning (for every $1 spent on family planning there is a $7 return on investment) and wealth of positive data as key ways to engage with morally opposed individuals. After all, relationship building has been at the heart of her success in the political world. With the upcoming election in the front of my mind, this brought me great hope for the future of the GGR and my own interest in health policy. As advocates for global health equity, Buckingham’s parting words were meant as inspiration and encouragement to those of us still in the undergraduate portion of our journeys. Facing us, she said “We need more curiosity and empathy in the world.”
Maya Gabby (NHS ‘21) is a third-year undergraduate at Georgetown studying global health, with specific interests in sexual and reproductive health and rights and health policy.